Feds Plan for NYC Nuclear Attack

A new study of the effects of a nuclear truck bomb in Manhattan: 1.6 million dead.

December 18, 2005 ? Federal officials are investigating the deaths and horrific injuries that would result if a nuclear truck bomb were set off by terrorists in Manhattan, The Post has learned.

A national medical expert has told them the aftermath of such an attack would be a blood-curdling picture out of Dante?s ?Inferno? ? and the city is ill-prepared to relieve the horror.

Cham Dallas, director of the federally funded Center for Mass Destruction Defense, discussed his conclusions at a Nov. 10 closed hearing of a congressional panel. He showed lawmakers data predicting 1.6 million New Yorkers could be killed, maimed, burned or sickened if a 20-kiloton nuke exploded at Broadway and Warren Street downtown.

?We are not prepared for the 100,000 burn victims,? Dallas said. ?It will be a picture out of Dante?s ?Inferno,? with all these people screaming in agony for days, and you won?t have enough people there to help them.?

A bomb that size, similar to the weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is considered ?relatively small? by today?s standards for thermonuclear weapons, and could be detonated from the back of ?a small rental truck or even a van,? Dallas said.